Help railroaders keep eye on retirement funds

For all the railroaders, both active and retired, our railroad retirement trust quarterly report for Sept. 30 has just been issued. From June 30 to Sept. 30 our investment trust has grown $900 million and today is $25 billion. This is just that portion of our retirement that is invested throughout the world.

Total assets of this investment trust and the money held by the Railroad Retirement Board now totals $26.7 billion. This is the amount that our government sporadically looks at and threatens to take to “bail out” Social Security. Today, we don't hear much thunder from Washington and our legislators as they deal with their new spending bill, but as long as Congress has some control of our railroad retirement, privatized or not, we should always be concerned.

Lobbyists for the protection of our railroad retirement meet at Luigi's restaurant in Oelwein on the first Tuesday of each month at 11:30 a.m. For more information, come and join us.

Lester Newton

Oelwein